Spike Jonze Will Eat You Up

Continued (page 2 of 8)

Sendak asked Jonze again after Being John Malkovich came out, and then once more after Adaptation. That was when it clicked. “It just hit me that wild things could be wild emotions,” says Jonze. “It was that simple of an idea. And all of a sudden, it seemed infinite where I could go from there.”

Jonze can be almost phobically reserved about the specifics of his early life (“Um, I just grew up in… I don’t know…in America?” he responds to my first direct question on the subject), but sometimes, as when he’s talking about childhood emotions, he’ll open up in a way that illuminates both movie and maker. “As a kid, that was really scary and confusing—both the wild emotions in me and the wild emotions in the people around me,” he says. “Unpredictable emotions, positive or negative—you don’t know where they’re coming from, you don’t know what they mean. Especially negative emotions. Your own behavior—you don’t know why you’re acting a certain way and it scares you, or you don’t know why somebody else is acting a certain way and it scares you. Big emotions that are unexplained are really scary. At least to me. I guess it’s anger, or sadness, guilt—or guilt for being angry, you know. Just the whole big mess that we’re sort of thrown into. Emotions are messy and hard to figure out. Hard to know where you start and the next person stops. Even as an adult, that’s a hard thing to know. As a kid it can be really confusing, because it’s all new and you’re trying to sort of make your map.”

That was what Where the Wild Things Are would be about.

*****

it seems that there is a secret fact many people believe they know about Spike Jonze and can’t wait to share with me: that he is actually the heir to the Spiegel-catalog fortune. Grateful as I am for such pointers, they are making two mistakes. One is in believing that this information is truly secret. In fact it has been mentioned in print many times, often by reputable sources. For instance: “Jonze is a pseudonym used by Adam Spiegel, a 29-year-old Bethesda, Maryland–bred heir to the $3-billion-a-year Spiegel catalog business, who in June married Hollywood hipster princess Sofia Coppola at Francis Ford Coppola’s Napa Valley vineyard” (New York magazine, 1999). “Spike Jonze, the hip film director, didn’t let the fact that he was born Adam Spiegel, heir to the clothing-catalog fortune, sink him into a slough of pampered despond” (The New York Times, 2003).

The second, more fundamental mistake when it comes to this secret fact is that it is not a fact at all. Jonze is heir to nothing of the sort—the slur that he’s a spoiled brat slumming with the cool kids is a false one. Jonze insists he often used to set the record straight. “I think I gave up,” he says. When he did say anything, he would explain that his real name is Adam Spiegel but that he is only distantly related to the catalog family. That, too, is slightly misleading. The catalog was started at the beginning of the past century by the German émigré Joseph Spiegel and his son Arthur. Given that Spike’s father is called Arthur Spiegel III, this suggests that the genetic link is a pretty direct one; Jonze confirms this. “Yeah. I guess, my great-great-grandfather. But my family hasn’t…They sold it. So it’s by name only.” (His mother has been variously described as a writer, a communications consultant, and having worked in public relations; his father used to run a medical-consulting business.)

Nor is the name he now uses an alias he adopted to distance himself from his privilege. It came when he was about 13, when he would hang out at the BMX shop in Rockville, Maryland—the nexus of the teenage obsession that would eventually plug him into BMX and skate culture and lead him, the moment he left school, to head west to California as a writer and photographer for skate magazines. “Spike” was inspired both by the haircuts Jonze used to give others and by his own youthful skyward hair; “Jonze” completes a homophone of the old-time eccentric bandleader Spike Jones. Nothing at all to do with escaping the stigma that might accompany what I refer to as “a multimillion-dollar catalog fortune.”

This is a description Jonze takes real exception to.

“I thought it was multibillion-dollar,” he insists. “That’s the one I heard.”

*****

armed with his “wild things = wild emotions” insight, Jonze worked on his own for about six months, writing pages and pages of notes and filling out the story of Max’s adventure with the wild things. He was excited by what he was coming up with, and Sendak was mostly supportive. “At a certain point,” says Jonze, “he was like, ‘I don’t care what’s in it. As long as you make something that is personal and that is dangerous and that takes it seriously and that doesn’t pander to kids and is honest, you can do whatever you want.’ ‘Take kids seriously,’ that’s what Maurice said, and that weaves right into my natural aesthetic and what I want it to feel like and what excites me.”